British Museum<\/em>) is a museum in the city of London, United Kingdom. Its collections cover diverse fields of human knowledge, such as history, archaeology, ethnography and art.<\/p>The museum was one of the first institutions of its kind in Europe. It guards more than seven million objects from all continents, many of which are stored for study and restoration, or kept due to lack of space to display them. It also has the largest reading room in the British Library, a library that, although it now has its own headquarters, was also part of the museum until 1973, as was the Natural History Museum in London, which changed its headquarters in the year 1963.<\/p>
The Ancient Egypt section is the most important in the world after that of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Entry to the museum and many of the services it offers \u2013 such as the reading room \u2013 are free of charge, with the exception of some temporary exhibitions.<\/p>
The museum officially opened to the public on January 15, 1759, in the\u00a0mansi\u00f3n Montagu<\/em>, but when it became too small, the construction of a new neoclassical-style building, designed by Robert Smirke, began in 1852 in the same location. The construction of the new headquarters of the museum, which has survived to this day, ended in 1857 with the construction of the\u00a0study circular<\/em>\u00a0room. On its main fa\u00e7ade, in the pediment, a sculpture complex built by the British sculptor Richard Westmacott was installed in 1852.<\/p>The\u00a0Duveen room<\/em>, which houses the Parthenon collection, was built in 1938 by the architect John Russell Pope, but in 1940 it was damaged by a bomb in the bombings of World War II, being rebuilt and reopened to the public in 1962 .<\/p>One of the latest additions to the British Museum opened in December 2000. It is the\u00a0Queen Elizabeth II Great Court<\/em>. Located in the center of the museum, it is designed by the studio of architect Norman Foster.<\/p>It occupies the place previously occupied by\u00a0British Library<\/em>, already transferred to its new headquarters. The Great Atrium has become the largest covered plaza in Europe (90 x 70 meters). The roof of the atrium is made of glass and steel, and is made up of 1,656 pairs of crystals.<\/p>In the center of the Great Atrium is located the\u00a0reading room<\/em>, which was previously part of the\u00a0Britanic Library<\/em>,<\/em>. The hall volumes were consulted by many great personalities throughout their history, such as Karl Marx, Oscar Wilde, Mohandas Gandhi, Rudyard Kipling, George Bernard Shaw, Vladimir Lenin and H. G. Wells. The reading room is open to anyone who wishes.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t